Friday, April 29, 2005

Randomness in life ....? Randomness some times teases you back in life so predictably that you start suspecting it. I have see many times some things happing - like seeing a person at some place many times ( called co-incidence?) and missing a bus/train regularly at times - things that ought to be random- behave like non-random. May be that is life.

Steven lavy on MSNBC ,while talking about iPod's "shuffle" feature - says his iPod which is suppose to the play tunes randomly, plays them in some specific order. He further quotes Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life and says that some times in trulely random events like tossing a coin - it is quite common to get 6 heads in a row ....". He ends the post with following lines which are truely amazing ...

"Life may indeed be random, and the iPod probably is, too. But we humans will always provide our own narratives and patterns to bring chaos under control. The fault, if there is any, lies not in shuffle but in ourselves.'

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

"testing is simply a non-deterministic task the outcome of which is somewhat unpredictable.' this is how Micheal hunter - describes in one of his posts. Dev - Test relationship has always been my fav topic. I am fortunate enough all these years to work with those 'understanding" developers who thinks that dev and test compliment each other. As I hear stories about dev feeling testers are "necessary evils", I feel that most of this due to historical reasons or due to the way some organizations look at testers. Without enough training, career paths - people are pushed to do testing - that is why we have lots of people called testers who made to this title because that failed in other area - mainly development. Micheal further says in his post about true dev test relationship that is based mutual trust and respect

"Every relationship is founded on trust - or the lack thereof - and this one is no different. Remember that you're not just fighting stereotypes about testers ("Testers can't code." "How hard can it be to find bugs?") but also about developers ("Developers write bugs into their code just to make my life miserable!" "How hard can it be to write bug-free software?") "

Friday, April 15, 2005

As I juggle with joining formalities and other initial stuff at iGate - my new company, I am back to blogging. Squeezing some time out, I started off reading some of fav blogs - one them happens to be of Brian Merrik. In one of his posts Brains talks about this guy - Guy Steele who is one of the leading figures of this new programming language initiative from SUN.

Look at this person's Bio - awesome. Reading some his quotes - I am really getting drawn towards this topic of Writing Language specifications. As Brian points out in his post, state tables are great tool to represent state machines.

Another interesting thing about this guy as pointed out in Brian's post is : he has a huge shower, in which he spends about twelve hours a day. I don't absolutely know that, but I deduce it from the time I heard him say he only gets good ideas in the shower.

As somebody rightly said "Successful people don't do different things but do things differently".

This language BTW, is touted to be better than Java - Another revolution in offing? Watch out for SUN.....